Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

“My God.” He said it flatly, and thought for a while. “She couldn’t wither me, Audrey. I wish she’d tried. I wish she’d given the party. I’d have been happy to make a little talk. I would have arranged the guests in the artificial ruins in some dramatic postures—common to the London streets—and I would have keyed my address in a moderate tone—”

“I told her you would dump her applecart. I told her last night, when I came in. She was mad enough—from the rumors about you she’d already heard. She didn’t go to the dinner last night because she was putting on the finishing touches at home.”

“Painting on bloodstains, I trust,” Jimmie said.

“Something of the sort. Jimmie. The reason I came over to the factory and waited for you was this. Could you possibly swallow your pride and practice a little tact around here? I mean, could you pretend a little—just to make peace? It might be good strategy.

You have no idea how Muskogewan is torn apart by the war! How furious people get at each other! What mean things they do! After all, the people on my side of the argument aren’t altogether crazy. A lot of them are smart and nice and earnest and sincere, I can understand how you feel. I don’t agree with you a bit just because I understand. I think the warmongers are mistaken. I think they have come to believe that Hitler is a boogieman, invincible and superhuman. I think, if he ever did plan an attack on America, he’d give ample evidence beforehand—and I think that would be the time to train soldiers and make arms. I mean, for ourselves. It’s all right to help England, probably. Dangerous—but idealistic, and all that. But if you’d just even pretend to accept some such a view it would make everything—so much more convenient.”

“Everything?” His voice was a rejection.

“Don’t you know what a girl means when she says, ‘everything’ in that way? She means—herself. Her life.”

“Enough Americans,” Jimmie mused, “had enough foresight and guts to pass the Lease-Lend Bill. That was Hitler’s first defeat. It’ll take dozens more—as big, as costly—to whip Hitler. But there are sure an awful lot of you people still doing Hitler’s work—sincere or not—just as advertised, predicted, and counted upon, by handsome Adolf and his general staff.”

She flushed brightly. “We’re not pro-German. You can’t say that.”

“No. And Pilate wasn’t procrucifixion. He just washed his hands.”

“You’re going to make me sore!”

“What about me? I came here only yesterday—bursting with love. With memories. With anticipations. I was never as happy in my life. And I was so darned proud of America. I knew my country had been laggard and doubtful and not wholly united. But I knew America had saved the sum of things twice—already. Once after Dunkirk. Once again in the battle of the Atlantic. And then, we drove up on the hill and we went into my house—and I found myself in a swarm of Benedict Arnolds. Not conscious ones. Not willful ones. Frightened ones, who were trying to betray all humanity just to save something that existed once, and still exists for the moment as a sort of echo here, but will not and cannot endure anywhere—much longer.”

“You’re so sure about the future!”

He nodded. “Sure it’ll be difficult. Dad wants to set the clock back. Spin the whole damned planet back. Nail it at a place in space and time known to him as 1929. The big year. The banner year. I remember it. I was sixteen, then. World trade, protective taxes, prohibition, stock market graphs like geysers! The great engineers were in the saddle. Business was king. I remember the bust. But it isn’t that, Audrey. Not that—which is coming to all of us. It’s something much worse. The world out of which we drew trade and profit and in which we invested in 1929 is gone. The plant is gone. The property is wrecked. The people are killed or scattered. The governments are smashed. Those who are still alive are weakened by hunger, misled by propaganda, full of dread and hate. Peace—any peace—is going to liberate a whole new set of revenges. Merciful God, can’t they see that? The industry of the earth has been rebuilt to make arms. How are we Americans going to thrive in that shambles? What’s your dad and my dad going to do to pay the national debt, and change back the factories here, and keep wages high enough so we can still have decent standards—and not a black 1932 raised to the hundredth power? The worst peace would mean slavery. The best peace will mean that the whole earth faces the most terrifying mess in the history of mankind.”

“Don’t you think we’ll be better off at that time if we, too, aren’t wholly devoted to making arms?”

“I, personally, don’t think we’ll exist at all if we aren’t wholly devoted to making arms—right now.”

“But your attitude doesn’t give us any alternative whatever! Rather, it just gives us two perfectly ghastly alternatives.”

“Yeah.”

“That doesn’t make sense!”

“Why? Must Americans forever go on thinking that there have to be two paths in life—one that leads to the gravy, and one that leads to hunger? Is there a cosmic rule that you always have to have a happy out? Can’t it be that, sometimes, you only have a choice between a whipping and a hanging? It not only can be—it is!”

“I can’t believe it.”

“We could have prevented it. So could England. We—and England—could have stopped the invasion of Manchuria. Ethiopia. The reoccupation of the Rhine. Anything like that. We didn’t. They didn’t. So—we’re going to payoff.”

“But the price is so out of scale with the mistake!”

Jimmie smiled at her. “You sound like my father. He wants to administer fate, too. He can tell you, to an inch and a penny, what is fair and what is unfair in the way life treats him. The dope! If you happen to drink a glass of water that you suspect isn’t very pure but that you figure won’t hurt you, and there was a cholera germ in the water and you die, that’s a hell of a price to pay for drinking a glass of bad water. But the ‘unfair’ scale of the disaster doesn’t make you live a day longer.”

Audrey drove off the road and under some pine trees. She stopped at a place where the trees opened on a bend in the river. At the bend, ice was breaking up and floating away on a fast-running central current. Across the river was a farm with a big, white barn and a lot of small, white outbuildings. Guernsey cows moved slowly against the browns of a hillside. A light wind came from the farm, smelling sweetly of it.

Audrey turned off the motor with a gloved hand, swung in her seat, drew up one foot, stabbed the lighter into the dashboard, fumbled in her yellow handbag for a cigarette, and reached for the lighter just as it popped out.

“I fell in love with you,” she said suddenly, startlingly.

“Nobody can fall in love in a night.”

Audrey laughed. “Can’t they? I’d like to know what you call what’s going on inside me! I didn’t sleep all night! I shook! I have a feeling like being on fire! I’ve done ages of, not thinking, but knowing about you since last night. Since you were so decent about—Ellen. I know all about you, everything—what you’d say if you were really making love to me—how you’d act if you drank too much—how you’ll look when you’re an old man—what you dream about when you sleep—what you want and what you hate, and what you believe in your heart! I know all that, and I know I will never get over this! Never, never, never.”

Jimmie was aghast. He wanted not to look at her—but he looked. She made no pretense of being composed. She was, indeed, shaking. She still resembled Ellen a great deal; but Ellen had been tranquil and self-possessed. Ellen would never have made such a statement. Not even in years of intimacy. Audrey was like a wild Ellen, an Ellen mixed with violent forces, a berserker, pagan Ellen. A cannibal Ellen, he decided.